Sessions at Mozilla Festival 2012 about games-mozfest on Sunday 11th November Full Festival Day

Scratch 2.0 allows you to create interactive games and animations while Thimble makes it incredibly easy to create and host your own webpage. Together they allow you to build rich web experiences right in your browser. Participants will learn how to use these applications together to easily create and host their own webpages with games and animations.

Our session will begin with a look at example projects created in Scratch and example websites created with Thimble. We’ll then walk through the creation of a simple website in Thimble and a simple project in Scratch and learn how to combine the two.

Once you have the basics down, you'll brainstorm ideas and then create your own interactive website (with support from the facilitators). You could make a simple game, a web poll, a tutorial site and so much more.

Designing games is an act of system hacking. You can approach the design of games from many directions. You can start with a mechanic you think holds the possibility to engage players. You can begin with the intention of invoking a feeling in players. Build up systems, tear them apart and build them back up. System hacking allows designers to learn to identify weaknesses and strengths and exploit them to new and novel ends.

In this session, we'll take apart the rule systems behind several popular physical games, like "Ninja" and hack those games into new experiences. What we'll find is that anyone can modify a game. The tricky part is modifying rules to produce specific aesthetic goals. But with analysis of existing game systems and design through a process of iteration, we'll find that we can begin to bend game systems and other user experience systems to our aims.

Take-aways:

Participants will learn how to analyze rules and systems underlying games, how to approach the reconfiguration of existing systems and the creation of new systems.

How to paper prototype, develop an ability to iterate new designs quickly, and how to make modifications of an existing game.

Join us for an intense and creative game building design challenge - small groups will converge, build, remix and hack together new game prototypes over the course of two days.

It's truly choose-your-own-adventure - you can return and continue working on your project, or jump into a new project, and new participants are welcome to arrive and start a new game or join an existing team. At the end of the second day we'll aim for time to demo our progress so teams can show off what they made.

You won't be starting from scratch - we'll have art and sound assets from OpenGameArt and the Liberated Pixel Cup on hand, assets from BrowserQuest, as well as libraries that provide common functionality like 2D collision and physics.

Take-aways:

Participants can create games that have hackable game spaces

Learn to change the design of a game space to understand how it influences the way in which designers use avatars, enemies and system sprites

Explore core game mechanics to create different patterns of action within a game

Customize your work with graphic assets and sounds from the web

Develop characters & storylines

Playtest and hacktest the prototypes.

Who should come?

Participants should have experience building software in HTML5/JS, but not necessarily games. Creative hackers, developers.

We will first present how game cabinets allow digital games to have an identity and presence within the physical and social environments it is placed. We will review the instructions on how to make sturdy and affordable game cabinets made of wood and cardboard and then make them at MozFest. We will also learn how to hack a mouse to create a one button interface. Finally, participants will place their one button games inside the boxes they have built and decorated.

The cabinets will be presented together in the One Button Cardboard Arcade.

Take-aways:

Shared cabinet making specs and instructions

Multiple Game & Cabinet Jams taught by session attendees

Carboard Arcades galore!

Who should come?

This is a session for both youth and adults, and we encourage younger participants to sign up with their guardians.

We'll explore the Craftyy editor, a drag-and-drop way to make & remix HTML5 games, all in the browser.

We'll go through the basics of each step in the game development process, remixing each others' games in the process.

You'll learn how to do the following with Craftyy:

Design: The basic drag & drop

Art: Creating and remixing art

Code: Changing the mechanics

Remixing: How you can reuse parts of other games in your own

Publishing: Share your games to a growing game tree

And by the end, you'll have collaboratively made an HTML5 game you can embed in your site or blog!

How will we do all that? We'll do something we call the Exquisite Corpse Roundtable.

Sounds horrifying, doesn't it? Well, the Exquisite Corpse is a game where each player draws part of an image, then passes it to the next player for further contribution. We'll be doing that, except with games.

Mozilla is launching the second Game On competition and invites you to show us what's possible using the web as an open gaming platform for the world; This is your opportunity to invent new game mechanics, create new storylines, engage diverse audiences, introduce aesthetically challenging content and re-imagine the web as a gaming platform.

Winners win a trip to the Game Developers Conference to meet industry pioneers and have their completed game featured in Mozilla's Marketplace.

Join us for a Q&A discussion about the competition and ways that you can get involved by hosting a Game On Jam at your local community.

When you think of a "Video Game" you might think of Angry Birds, or StarCraft, Call of Duty, or Dwarf Fortress. These games use graphics, and the player uses inputs to modify and control the way those graphics interact. What would your game look like if you removed all that? What could a non-graphical game look like in our networked world? What might fill the void of graphics to create a compelling experience?

This session asks people to think outside the bitmap to design and create games and rule sets that engage people without using any sort of visual flair. Text based games, place based games, or maybe even games involving the navigation of cyberspace! There are tons of creative and addictive experiences that engage imagination and critical thought without using vectors and animation.

Take-aways:

Explore exiting non-graphical games (and games of the past).

Learn how to think through the process of ruleset design, and how to set up NodeJS and SocketIO

How to create a prototype and a ruleset for their non-graphical game

Who should come?

This session is imagination-driven. The more people, the more imagination potential!

The web, and the internet it runs on, is deeply borne of a hacker ethos - the same motivations that gave birth to the videogames industry in the 70s and 80s. However, just as we hack together new frameworks for human action, we also need to respect existing frameworks and take time to play within them. The web would be nothing without its standards agreements, and games are no fun if nobody actually plays them.

This fireside chat will use games as a microcosm to kick off a wider discussion about the difference between the disruptive power of hacking *new* systems, and the harmonizing influence of playing within *existing* ones, and the dynamic tension this difference generates.

You're a Game Developer. What is the best use of your time? How do you best position your product for as wide a reach as possible, and across as many profitable platforms as possible?
A number of platforms are becoming more and more hackable. Lets learn how to reach them all and do it at absurd speeds.

This session will touch on how you best realize your game or app's true potential by bringing it to mobile, web, desktop, and more with only small bits of platform-specific changes.

We'll be sharing experiences with the gotchas of multi-platform development, talking about time saving tips for multi-platform development, and going into some of the ways to combat user interface woes when working with touch and click interfaces, small and large resolutions, and much more.

Participants will walk away with insanely useful nuggets about bringing games or apps to: